For my economical system the only thing I need to know still is what's the course between dollar(or euro for me) and simdollars. I thought multiplying by 7 (eg for houses that would be compareble) but that's not the correct multiplying factor for eg rent. How do you guys see it? It might help me figuring something out.

Don't forget that the game was made in the US - things are differently priced there, so you're not going to perfectly match up the prices with what we're used to in Europe. Another factor is that sim's lives are pretty much a summary of a real life - a day is about a year and birthdays celebrate milestones in age, like childhood and puberty, but the amount of money they earn per day is more like a month's wage (and with pregnancy a day is three months!). I think the developers just choose prices so that players would be able to buy stuff and houses for their sims (within reason) because in an unmodded game there is no such thing as a loan. Furniture doesn't get old either and only breaks because of fire or pets. In other words, I don't think real-life prices match up with in-game prices.
For example, in real life the most expensive artworks are worth millions, but unless you heavily abuse the OfB system your sim isn't going to earn millions a day/month/year so the most expensive artwork is Â§5,000. The difference between the cheapest car and the most expensive one is much smaller than real-life differences. I also think that the default budget of Â§20,000 is just carried over from The Sims, and lot and building prices are based off of that.
I might be wrong and these might all be very realistic prices in the US for the most part (except for the really expensive stuff)! I hope you find a solution, maybe different multipliers for different categories perhaps?

Don't forget that the game was made in the US - things are differently priced there, so you're not going to perfectly match up the prices with what we're used to in Europe. Another factor is that sim's lives are pretty much a summary of a real life - a day is about a year and birthdays celebrate milestones in age, like childhood and puberty, but the amount of money they earn per day is more like a month's wage (and with pregnancy a day is three months!). I think the developers just choose prices so that players would be able to buy stuff and houses for their sims (within reason) because in an unmodded game there is no such thing as a loan. Furniture doesn't get old either and only breaks because of fire or pets. In other words, I don't think real-life prices match up with in-game prices.
For example, in real life the most expensive artworks are worth millions, but unless you heavily abuse the OfB system your sim isn't going to earn millions a day/month/year so the most expensive artwork is Â§5,000. The difference between the cheapest car and the most expensive one is much smaller than real-life differences. I also think that the default budget of Â§20,000 is just carried over from The Sims, and lot and building prices are based off of that.
I might be wrong and these might all be very realistic prices in the US for the most part (except for the really expensive stuff)! I hope you find a solution, maybe different multipliers for different categories perhaps?

I know it's nearly impossible to have 1 multiplier for it all.
I was indeed thinking about different multipliers for different categories and maybe not for all the categories, but I was thinking about at least houses, rent and cars.
And I was mostly curious about how other players see/do that.

Just pick a multiplier and stick with it? You can for instance pick US dollars and round up/down. I don't think your sims mind much what you do. It's not easy to make things fit together anyway. I'm guessing the sim dollar is loosely based on the US dollar, and the euro isn't far off, so any of them might be a good option.

1) It's called Simoleon, not "Sim Dollar"
2) I don't think it's meant to be realistic, in any way.

1) it is called "sim dollar" in Dutch. Sorry I didn't know it in English
2) I just want some sort of comparison to RL to understand it a bit better in game. Wanting to make it realistic would not be realistic.

Sorry I can't be more helpful, lientebollemeis, cuz while I do try to come up with my own systems and am even trying to overhaul my game's careers, I don't really convert simoleans to the dollar.

As an American, most of the game's pricing "feels right" to me, though some things are also wildly out of portion too. But I think that's because things are done to scale, in relation to what a sim earns, and that's how I approach things in my game.

Any multipler used would be very specific to an area and maybe even time period. Your multiplier of 7, for example, is waaaaaaaaaayyy too low for where I live (NYC), in terms of housing anyway. Sims get about 3-4 times the apartment for what we pay in real life.

But I digress. The way I would approach it is to just use the game pricing, and add up how much I think a sim in a certain tier would have (house, furniture, clothes, cars, vacations, and all that), then build my system around that. I might factor in the cost of kids, too--like how much their furniture would be, assuming a new renovation each life stage, and how much a new full set of clothes would be for each life stage. Once I have all that info, I could see how long it would take sims to earn things and figure out how to set up my financial system (which in my case is mostly just overhauling salaries).

For the UK:
The average cost of a property for the first time buyer is Â£203152.
Sims get 20,000 simoleons for the first time (single sim) buyer, so that indicates that 1 simoleon = ~Â£10 UK (rounded for simplicity).

To buy a loaf of bread and a pack of lunch meat to serve six would cost (Â£1 + Â£0.60)=Â£1.60
To make six lunch meat sandwiches in Sims 2 costs 4 simoleons, so that indicates that 1 simoleon =Â£2.50 UK.

So the proportions are a little out for UK prices. In the UK, inflation is calculated with the help of a basket of goods. It would be interesting to hear if other parts of the world have cheaper housing in relation to food proces, as our sims do.

I thought food was reasonably priced in my area until you told me what a loaf of bread and lunch meat cost, simsample! Maybe you could get a loaf of bread for that, I doubt you could get lunch meat for that, but you definitely can't get both. At least not at any of the stores I'm familiar with.

The problem is that there is no consistent scale in-game. For instance, there are many couches in the game that are more expensive than a new car, and in no reality in no place on Earth are you going to pay more for a single couch (And before some smarty-pants comes along, I mean a couch of the sort that you'd find in a normal, mainstream furniture store, not that you'd find in a museum or that you'd pay for some wacky "one-of-a-kind" "designer" piece ) than you will for a new car, even the cheapest possible new car. No one takes out a loan to buy a couch, after all. The average price of a new car in the US right now -- I looked it up -- is $36,000; the lowest-priced 2018 base models are about half that. The most expensive Maxis car -- that ugly Ferrari-like thing -- is about $11,000 which wasn't realistic in 2004. It MIGHT have been somewhat realistic for a higher-end car (but not a Ferrari) in 1974, before "Reagan-omics" screwed everything to hell, when the average cost of a new car was about $3500.) I mean, you could consider the cars used in-game or you could consider the price of the car in-game as the down-payment and then sack your Sims with a loan for the balance of the "real" price -- which is precisely what I sometimes do, and I sometimes do the same with houses -- but that's an "outside of the game" thing. In the game...Yeah, you can buy a brand-new car for $900.. but a closet or an armchair or a dresser or a couch or a freakin' MIRROR will set you back the same amount or more. Heck the most expensive POTTED PLANT is only about $220 less than a car. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Also, in no reality would your rent be the equivalent of, say, 1/20 of a whole, basically-furnished (as most "starter" houses are) house. Were that the case, no one would rent, at least not for more than a year or two, because it wouldn't take long to save up for a whole house without even needing a mortgage, especially not if you could live with your parents in the interim. In my game, most of the small, cramped, average kind of two-bedroom apartments that struggle to house a family of three people without them tripping over each other have rents that are around $1000-$1500 per week. If you consider a Sim-week to be the equivalent of a real-world month (which totally doesn't work in terms of the length of the unmodded adult lifestage, but go with me here), then that's actually fairly realistic for many areas of the US, say the nicer areas in the 'burbs, BUT it doesn't jive with the cost of a house at all, with price tags of $20,000 or less. I looked up the current median selling price of a house in the US as a whole, and it's about $275,000, which at current exchange rates of about 0.90USD to 1 euro, is about 238,000 euros. A twentieth of that would be about $14,000, not $1,000. And not $7000, either, if you were to multiply by 7. The scale is just way off.

All in all, since there's no internal consistency in the game's pricing of objects and real estate at all, there's no way that you can come up with a multiplier that will make sense across the board. What you'd need to do to really make it work is to restructure all the prices in the game -- including all the build-mode stuff, down to walls and making roofs actually cost something -- so that houses you build have more realistic end-prices, and so that your prices will be consistent across the board. Which you CAN do. (Well, maybe not making roofs cost something, but the other things you can do.) I've thought about doing it, even, but in the end it just gave me a raging headache and I decided to suspend belief instead. But just as a "for example?" One of the problems of that kind of restructuring would be that you'd drive up rents to ridiculous amounts in order to make house prices more believable. So why would anyone rent an apartment when they could just buy a house for far less money?

On the other hand Andrew paid 200 Simoleons the other day for a pair of shorts with wellington boots. (Thanks Charity!) I'm wearing a rather similar pair of shorts, but mine cost Â£4 from Primark. I can't remember what I paid for my wellies, but I think it was about Â£9 from Shoe Zone.

In my childhood you could buy quite a substantial house for about Â£2,000. I bought my own stone-built tenement flat near Glasgow in 1971 for Â£2,500, when I was still in my late teens. So at some time in my life a "starter" home must have cost about Â£20,000. Today's Real Life house prices are just silly money.

All in all, I think that the exchange rate of the Simoleon against the Dollar (or indeed against the Euro or the Pound) is something in the order of 1:1. In other words the Simoleon is a currency unit with a substantial value -- not like the old Italian Lira. When quoting real life prices in this forum, I often try to give an equivalent in Simoleons, as I take it that the Simoleon will be the only currency unit familiar to all Simmers. For that purpose I use 1:1 against the US Dollar.

I'm sure the economy of the Sim Nation works slightly differently to most of our countries. Even though there's a nominal parity of the Simoleon (Â§) against the US Dollar ($), Some things like houses are much cheaper, while other, equally essential things like clothes cost much more.

I think my Sims might stare at me with blank incomprehension if I told them I'd bought a pair of shorts for the equivalent of Â§5. "Where?" they'd ask.

Actually I think that my Â£4 shorts are really meant as swimwear, but I wear them as Everyday in summer. That's a trick I try to teach my Sims to save money on their clothing.

I kind of built my own financial system since - as other players have pointed out - it's not realistic or consistent. Basically, if a sim is earning x simoleons (or Sim Dollars per day, then I multiply it by 12 (since in my game 1 day = 1 month, and I have both ages and pregnancy lengths modded to that end) to get their yearly salary. From there, I can calculate taxes and how much things should cost, and also how much sims in owned businesses should be paid. No it doesn't add up perfectly, but I don't mind that as long as the taxes/loan system works.

Well, this is sorta what I mean about the multiplier being tied to a time period. Perhaps a lot of the pricing system is a carry over from the early days of the game development, which was years ago. It doesn't explain the vast differences across the catalog, but it does help put salaries and the prices of homes & cars in perspective.

My parents bought their house, a 2 bedroom, 1 and a half bath, for about $50,000 30 years ago. Considering NYC pricing is more expensive than the rest of the country, $20,000 doesn't seem so silly for a house. And because the 70s and 80s were a different time, with different availability of goods and resources, that might explain some of the pricing scaling, though not all. Perhaps the scale should be for 20-30 years ago. Would that help the multiplier?

So why would anyone rent an apartment when they could just buy a house for far less money?

Homes under the hammer taught me: location, location, location

But yeah, I always thought that prices in game were strange though I,ve never really thouht too much about it because numbers are hard and I've failed economics several times at this point so I won't be understanding the numbers any time soon

Not to be a pedant, but I think the reason simoleons don't add up properly is because each item has a scale - so beds range from 100s to 700s, and TVs range from 100s to 1000s (for example), each individual item has a scale that is unrelated to any of the others, so it's hard to quantify value. I just look at it this way: if my sim buys a house for 10k, they'll need around 8k to furnish it a good (but not expensive) taste. So having 20k in the bank makes them something like middle class - they have enough to meet basic needs and splurge a little on extras while keeping some money (2k) for savings. If they have less, someone's got wet pants because there's no toilet, and if they have more everyone's got their own damn tv so stop going into each others rooms. Kinda works for me regardless, but yeah, it's random.

Houses here, well here in QLD country you can get a basic 3 bedroom house for about 200,000. Double that for the capital city. Since I can make a basic starter on a tiny block for 10,000 sim dollars I would multiply by 20. For houses anyway. I think you would have to find each item type its own multiplier.

"I dream of a better tomorrow, where chickens can cross the road and not be questioned about their motives." - Unknown

On the other hand Andrew paid 200 Simoleons the other day for a pair of shorts with wellington boots. (Thanks Charity!) I'm wearing a rather similar pair of shorts, but mine cost from Primark. I can't remember what I paid for my wellies, but I think it was about from Shoe Zone.
I think my Sims might stare at me with blank incomprehension if I told them I'd bought a pair of shorts for the equivalent of Â§5. "Where?" they'd ask.

To be fair, their clothes last forever. If your shorts could survive you, your children, your grandchildren and your grand-grand-children while being worn for days on end they would probably go for a few hundred pound as well.
It's a bit of a shame that clothing doesn't have some kind of cheap/moderate/expensive system in the game, but a lot of CC makers would forget about it anyway or make everything cheap. I guess making everything pricey evens it out.

Actually, lientebollemeis, what are you planning to use those comparisons for anyway? A tax system?

Well, this is sorta what I mean about the multiplier being tied to a time period. Perhaps a lot of the pricing system is a carry over from the early days of the game development, which was years ago. It doesn't explain the vast differences across the catalog, but it does help put salaries and the prices of homes & cars in perspective.

My parents bought their house, a 2 bedroom, 1 and a half bath, for about $50,000 30 years ago. Considering NYC pricing is more expensive than the rest of the country, $20,000 doesn't seem so silly for a house. And because the 70s and 80s were a different time, with different availability of goods and resources, that might explain some of the pricing scaling, though not all. Perhaps the scale should be for 20-30 years ago. Would that help the multiplier?

While your argument might make sense if the game was made in the 80s, it was made in the 2000s. Which, yeah, the 80s were a much different time. The difference between then and now was the fallout of Reagan's economic policies (Massive tax cuts for corporations/the wealthy and its accompanying inflation and the ballooning of national AND personal debt and...Oh hey! Look what we're doing again, yay!) completely changed EVERYTHING, but it didn't happen until well after Reagan and Bush the First were out of office. Didn't REALLY hit until the early 90s, so Clinton was left to attempt to fix things. (So, y'know, God help the US 15 or so years from now, if things are allowed to keep going as they are.) So yeah, in the 80s you could buy a nice 3-bedroom suburban house on a decent bit of land for about $100,000. (Which is still a lot more than $20,000, BTW. You'd have to go back to about 1965, about when I was born, for the average price of house to be about that. ) I myself bought such a nice house for about $100,000 in 1984...and then I sold that house for about 3 times as much -- without having done anything major to it, just replacing carpet and appliances and doing some painting inside -- in 1996, just 12 years later. Meantime, wages didn't increase commensurately in that period of time and your average family became massively in debt with huge mortgages AND the cost of higher education skyrocketed AND...Anyway, yeah, everything changed and NOT for the better. And it still wasn't better in 2004, and it's not better now.

But anyway...In any case, I'm pretty sure money in the game was never meant to make real-world sense. It's meant to make "game sense." In the base game, every new Sim/family gets $20,000 out of the "starting gate," so it makes sense that in the base game -- which doesn't include apartments, of course -- a starter house with basic furniture to get you by for a while until the household makes some money costs no more than $20,000. It also makes sense that nicer stuff that your Sims buy as they make more money would cost disproportionately more or else there'd be no logical reason for nicer stuff to give better room scores than basic stuff, for instance. If you just accept the game for what it is, it's fine and it all makes an odd sort of sense. It's only when you try to make it make "real world" sense that it's going to fall apart around your ears and give you migraines. So, like I said, I suspend disbelief and just go with it, myself.